Funny timing, I just went to a tanning salon for the first time yesterday. I asked for the weakest bed (level 1), which has the most UVB (for vitamin D production). They were shocked that I wanted to use level 1, apparently no one uses it. They also suggested starting at 5 mins instead of the 1-2 minutes I wanted to do. The machine itself has a notice saying not to go over 3 mins for the first week.
I was following the protocol from this paper, which started people at 2 mins and used low wattage UVB-heavy bulbs.
Sunbeds with UVB radiation can produce physiological levels of serum 25-Hydroxyvitamin D in healthy volunteers
Unfortunately the Science Advances paper being discussed is epidemiological and doesn't distinguish between the type of bulb, length of time, and other parameters used while tanning. However it is safe to say that the average tanner cares more about getting dark than anything else.
I think there would actually be a market for vitamin D centered "healthy tanning" where only low wattage, high-UVB bulbs are used particularly in cloudy areas or where the winter is long. I'm that guessing the operating costs for that kind of business would be cheaper than your average tanning salon, too.
Interesting... What benefits does this have over vitamin D supplements?
I've seen this "optimising for some perceived negative effects" thing with toothbrushes/toothpaste, where "whitening" and stiff bristles actually just means removing more (irreplaceable) enamel from your teeth.
Many people with inflammatory disease like IBD can't absorb oral vitamin D properly
Even in healthy people, oral vitamin D is not always sufficient (there was a study done in Japan where sunlight is low but Vitamin D from fish is high - can't find it right now) and sunlight exposure might have other benefits than vitamin D anyway
Vitamin D supplements are controversial on their own.
There is ample results on better health correlated with higher levels of Vitamin D, but the reverse is far more teneous: shoving in Vitamin D isn't guaranteed to be properly absorbed, and even when it is we don't see conparable results to people producing the Vitamin D themselves.
Unless you are deficient it's not the vitamin D. It's a whole host of other processes that benefit your body from sun exposure and the activities that go along with it. The Vitamin D is just a marker that we can detect that can also be related to that same exposure. So there's a huge number of things for which people with high levels of Vitamin D do not suffer but supplementing has no effect because the vitamin D is only correlated not causative.
But wouldn’t this imply that optimizing the tanning bed properties for vitamin D production is worse than looking for as-close-to-sun-like sources of light?
The paper covers a lot, some are administrating vitamin D as a prevention measure, most are on vitamin D deficient patients. e.g
> Even in the small subgroup of subjects with a poorer vitamin D status (serum 25OHD < 20 ng/mL), no effect on fracture risk was observed (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.07; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.91–1.25).
> A large RCT in Mongolian children with severe vitamin D deficiency did not find a beneficial effect of vitamin D supplementation on the subsequent risk of subclinical or clinical tuberculosis.
I have issues with low vitamin D and even really high supplement doses like 10,000iu/d do nothing at all- my level keeps dropping no matter how much I supplement. Sunlight brings it up quickly but not in the winter from Nov-Jan.
Vitamin D supplements don’t work consistently across different populations. Very few (~10%) of people can absorb dietary vitamin D. If you aren’t some form of Northern European, you probably need to take at least 10 times the daily recommended dose of vitamin D to influence your levels significantly.
Don't most people who take supplements just take 10X the RDA? It is still a tiny amount of supplement that is safer and costs a fraction of the indoor tanning or traveling often to somewhere with adequate Sun.
I’ve never talked to someone supplementing vitamin D who was aware at all.
I think that the correct approach would be start at 10x vitamin D with baseline bloodwork and adjust dosage from there.
But yeah I’m in the camp of “sun is good for you, in most cases.” I would be very unsurprised to find that there are precursor hormones released beyond vitamin D that impact efficacy. We don’t really understand the endocrine system very well.
I think that because we can see and understand the dermatological effects we overly weight them. Anecdotally older people I know who have not avoided the sun seem much better off mentally and physically, but I think because there isn’t a measurable reason we’re aware of, we completely discount any benefit.
Stiff bristles also damage your gum more easily and can lead to gum recessions. I needed gum transplants because of this and a wrong brushing technique. For me even medium stiffness is too hard.
as a man of south asian descent growing up in massachusetts, I would find myself getting very depressed around the middle of the winter. I actually found a huge amount of relief by going into a sunbed for 2 min a month. I'd feel much better and my cravings would change from fried food to salads.
I looked into this extensively during lockdowns. There is a specific wavelength that maximises Vitamin D. And there are medically approved devices that use special fluorescent bulbs that output this. It's mainly used in Nordic countries.
I tried to find an LED strip equivalent but couldn't not - there are strips that produce a lower wavelength than UV-A but from what I remember it was too low of a nm for good vitamin D.
Could be an interesting product however ! I wanted to hand two strips in my shower and turn them on for a few minutes while I washed up during the winter.
Unfortunately even the tanning beds you were using still produce a lot of UV-A which will age your skin. And funnily enough UV-B also produces a much longer lasting tan (though slower) which would mean less return trips for people who are just looking for aesthetics
I do exactly what you are describing and it seems to work for me, from a vitamin D perspective. I started this because I read a paper stating the same health benefits were not seen from supplements as with people who got the vitamin D from sunlight. I believe that is true, but of course can not be certain.
I use the Sperti Vitamin D sunlamp at home during the winter months. It wasn't cheap but wasn't crazy expensive either and seems to be what you want (e.g. UVB).
Well, the 'active ingredient' in these things is the bulb and a reputable brand (Philips medical) runs about 150 euros for a 100w tube with a R17d plug:
You then just need the right ballast for it and a basic timer, maybe a reflector and stand and you're in business. Getting smaller qty is going to be an issue since these suppliers tend to sell in packs of 10.
Apparently the a ballast runs about 70 euros and can power two bulbs.
I might look into it since it's down right affordable compared to the alternatives.
There's a history of finding really strong correlations between vitamin D levels and (many kinds of) health, and then disappointing results for RCTs of vitamin D supplementation. There are lots of possible explanations of this, but it seems like a plausible one is that there are some good things sunlight does for you other than produce vitamin D. So I'm a little nervous about everyone eliminating all sun exposure and then taking vitamin D geltabs to compensate, even though sunlight carries some risks. (But obviously too much ionizing radiation is also a problem, and it sounds like most users of tanning beds are getting a lot of intense exposure)
I wonder how much correlation this has with exercise. Generally if you are getting good levels of sunlight, there is a good chance you are outside exercising, even if it's just walking.
After all, exercise is the undisputed God tier all-time winning champion of "Studies show that ______ is good for xyz."
I've taken up running because it's a way to get sunlight during the winter, I can run in shorts and a t shirt. I am very active, but I start getting a lot of anxiety if I don't get sunlight on my skin for a week or two.
UVA triggers the release of nitric oxide from the skin into the bloodstream. This causes blood vessels to dilate, lowering blood pressure and improving circulation.
Exposure to sunlight (or lack of it) affects our circadian rhythm and production of melatonin, which affects our sleep quality. Exposure to morning sun in particular is linked with better sleep quality, leading to better health.
> There's a history of finding really strong correlations between vitamin D levels and (many kinds of) health, and then disappointing results for RCTs of vitamin D supplementation.
This might just mean that bodies that are healthier in many other aspects are also better at managing their vitamin D stores which isn't all that surprising.
There are plenty of foods with vitamin D. You don't actually need to supplement it unless you're a vegetarian, you just need to actively include those foods in your diet.
The current argument I've read for why fair-skinned people even evolved near the North Sea and not anywhere else near the arctic is exactly that the Gulf Stream allowed a cereals-based diet rather than a meat based diet, which led to vitamin D deficiencies which caused problems in pregnancy, leading to people with fairer skin being the most likely to avoid those problems.
You definitely don't need to get your vitamin D from the sun.
I don't know where you read that fair skin is a diet adaptation and not a sunlight one, but that's wrong: fair skin is an adaptation to northern latitudes due to reduced sunlight. The majority of people of African descent in America are vitamin D deficient, but in Ghana — where there is much poorer nutrition, but more sunlight — they're not. Meanwhile, the majority of white Americans are not vitamin D deficient. [1]
Getting sufficient vitamin D takes 6x longer sun exposure for black people than for white people. [2] In northern latitudes that's pretty difficult.
My favorite one that I read about is mushrooms. If you grow them in the sun, some species allegedly acquire vitamin D. I am not sure how much nor if this is truly effective, but it gives me a good excuse to grow various mushrooms next spring.
You might be interested in the British history of Vitamin D supplementation. It all started with kids in the cities getting rickets because the pollution (smog) was that bad that they never got to see further than a metre or two during the worst of it. The way to get around was by taking the tram as that had rails to guide it through the 'pea soupers'.
So they put the kids on trains and took them off to the seaside.
But then...
The railway also allowed milk to be brought into the cities. So they added vitamin D to milk. That was how the rickets was solved. In time milk became free at school, usually it was warm by morning break, which was when it would get consumed, from mini-milk bottles, that would get reused.
I am only piecing together this history, no definitive source, unless you include my elderly neighbour. However, food history is fascinating, once you get away from celebrated brands to the unsung heroes of the vegetable aisle.
What I can't work out is why the children were so vulnerable to rickets when the adults weren't. Workers weren't being sent out to the countryside or beach to get some sun, just the kids. Rickets doesn't affect adults with grown bones, in theory, the adults should have had really painful joints and osteoporosis, but maybe this was not understood at the time.
In time the clean air zones were setup and the smog was banished to a certain extent, by which time it became uncommon to fortify milk with vitamin D. Finally we had Margaret Thatcher, famously the 'milk snatcher', for stopping free school milk.
In the UK we do get vitamin D randomly added to processed foods (what else?) and this is a scattergun approach to fortifying the population. If you don't eat processed foods then you are not going to get any of that processed food fortification goodness.
Then there are the animal corpse sources, as in oily fish and whatnot. If you eat any diet except for whole-food-plant-based vegan, then you are going to get vitamin D either through dead animal or fortification. Vegetarians just have to eat maaassivve blocks of cheese, which they will, with a few eggs and some breakfast cereal to get their vitamin D needs roughly covered. Junk-food vegans should get some vitamin D goodness from fortifications too, particularly if they consume things like 'oat milk' (as if oats have mammary glands). Pure junk food, a.k.a. 'Standard American Diet', should also be pretty good for vitamin D.
So this only really leaves the whole-food, plant-based, everything-cooked-from-scratch vegan diet as lacking, at least as far as the winter months is concerned. Was this a problem historically? I don't think so. Since people used to work the fields, they had plenty of vitamin D to carry over for winter.
Before we had 'modern day racism' in the UK, we had a situation where the aristocracy had white skin and everyone else had leathery brown skin, from working outside. White skin was proof that you didn't have to work the fields and therefore, you were higher status. Racism pre-dated racism, if you get my drift, it was mere class-based xenophobia back then. To be 'truly white' you had to have no tan.
Since meat was hard to come by, peasants were 95% vegan by default, yet working the fields, so vitamin D deficiency was not a problem, for the 1% aristocracy (since they had their oily fish, red meat and dairy) or for the 99% that had to spend lots of time outdoors.
I am not sure where you are coming from regarding the Gulf Stream and cereals. The Fertile Crescent was where farming began for Europe, with wheat not actually growing in the UK and other grains (barley) being the chosen grain. It was only with the Norman Conquest that wheat made it to the UK.
When the Romans made it to the UK they were perplexed at what they found. There were two tribes, the nomadic cattle types and the hill fort living grain growers that were not nomadic. The hill forts got in the way of the migration routes between pastures. The Romans were disgusted by the milk drinking since nobody would do that in Rome, where everyone was lactose intolerant, unlike the Celts.
> What I can't work out is why the children were so vulnerable to rickets when the adults weren't
Presumably, children need regular and consistent amounts due to bone growth. Once past puberty, less mineralization of calcium and phosphate happens, which is one of the processes in the body that requires vitamin D.
There is probably stuff we don’t know. For example, some people sneeze when they look or are exposed to the sun (for me, usually in the morning). There is still no scientific explanation for why it happens.
There are no devices that can produce a full-spectrum light like the one you get from the sun. So my suggestion would be to go outside and breathe instead of sitting in a box.
Today is the first time in December my town gets any sunlight and boy am I excited. Not because we are that far north, it's still the height of the winter after all, it was just shit weather.
Excessive UV exposure in general not a great time, tanning is just a way of speedrunning damage unless done in very short intervals.
I'll never understand some people's fetishization with getting darker via tanning though. Theres nothing wrong with light skin, its only a few western countries that seem to have a weird fetishization with cooking your skin longterm to get darker short term.
Meanwhile most other countries and peoples are willing to damage their skin in whole other ways trying to get the opposite.
"wealthy people can stay inside while poor people work in the sun" vs. "wealthy people can vacation in sunny countries while poor people stay home in the cold"
The US has 200 million white people that live in a mostly warm and sunny climate. Women often tan before vacations or events so they look better in the pictures.
I live in Asia and I think tanned white people do not look good at all most of the time, to me it just looks weird. I much prefer the pale look. People with naturally tan skin however I think look very good.
It's 100% cultural. I think the pale look is super unattractive and ghostly/ghoulish. Tanned skin is beautiful.
It's not that it is a sign of wealth due to leisure. People who work outdoors are tanned too. It's the warmness. The glowing. The gradients. Something impressed upon me at a young age that this is the standard of beauty.
When I'm in Asia and I see people carrying umbrellas and doing skincare, their skin looks clinical and less appealing to me than those who aren't doing it. I logically know the anti-sun regime is healthier for their skin, but my primate brain tells me it's unattractive.
It's unfortunate that increasing melanin production from the sun causes DNA damage. Because it looks so good to me.
There are a variety of drugs that induce pigmentation or melanocyte production, but none are FDA approved. Most of them can lead to cancer, either by uncontrolled cell proliferation, impact on unrelated cell populations, or disrupting normal hormonal signalling.
Melanotan-II was popular some years back, but there are half a dozen others that use a variety of different mechanisms. None of them are approved.
It's unfortunate that we haven't developed something better than exposing ourselves to DNA damage, but it's probably not the biggest priority.
I grew up in Northern Europe and I still think when people back home do tanning it looks so bad and makes them look super old. They look much better with the natural skin as it's not damaged and it's kind of even. Like I see women in their 20s easily looking like 35 no kidding. I am glad I avoided the sun from young age so I get comments now in my 30s that I look like early 20s which is mostly due to the skin.
Like sometimes I watch American news and the fake tans are just yucky and kind of gross to me.
Same with western women I see in Asia occasionally, age in 20s but looks easily 30+ while it's the opposite with many Asians. Eastern Europeans tend to avoid the sun more.
I don't know if it's every Asian country, but Thailand absolutely has an obsession with skin whitening products (whiter skin is correlated with wealth/higher-class and not having to work outside). I found it hard to find a non-whitening lotion while there actually. I really doubt many of these products are safe and it looks very uncanny-valley and weird to me, which is maybe what you're picking up on as unattractive too. Definitely a cultural thing.
The women look much much younger than western equivalents though because they avoid the sun. It's hard to look at western girls in twenties who look like they are in their mid 30s. However, the western girls who have used sunscreen tend to look super good with the original skin.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the overcooked look either. The damage really adds up quick, I doubt many look ahead to their 40s-50s while torching their 20s away though (something something youth wasted on the young)
It's the same in the Philippines. Try finding soap, lotion, or sunscreen that doesn't include whitening agents, which are usually very unhealthy for the skin.
It's very much the case that in the Philippines, lighter skin is viewed as upper class haciendero/mestizo culture (not having to work outdoors, not being a nanny, maid, or "helper"). It's the same in many other Asian cultures. Women who live in Asian countries with a high concentration of plastic surgery "procedures" and treatments (like South Korea, for instance) are often the standards of beauty for other Asian countries even though such procedures/whitening and eye/nose surgeries are out of reach.
What do you think those numbers represent? Just so everyone is clear, it's still 12% when we are talking about females who frequently outdoor tan of all races with half the group over 45 years old in a tiny test group. Not exactly relevant
People also tan before going on sunny vacations to get a “base” and prevent extreme burns. See: flights back to the Midwest from Miami after Spring Break.
The popularity of tanning is attributed to fashion designer Coco Chanel, who accidentally got too much sun on a Mediterranean cruise in 1923. Since she was a fashion icon, this made the tanned look fashionable.
As an aside, the chemistry behind UV damage is interesting. You can think of DNA as a sequence of four letters: C, G, A, and T. If there are two neighboring T's, UV can move a bond, linking the two T's together (i.e. thymine dimerization). If you're in the sun, each skin cell gets 50-100 of these pairs created per second. Enzymes usually fix these errors, but sometimes the errors will cause problems during DNA replication and you can end up with mutations. Enough of the wrong mutations can cause skin cancer. So wear sunscreen!
It's too late to edit my previous comment, but I wanted to add one more random tanning fact: UV releases β-endorphin so tanning is literally addictive, to the point that naloxone will cause withdrawal symptoms, at least in mice: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(14)00611-4
I’m naturally pretty pale and don’t get much sunlight, I feel like I look like shit unless I get just a little bit of tan. What most people would consider just a healthy looking “baseline”. It also puts me in a better mood although that may be entirely psychological.
When I was younger I used to intentionally tan for short durations, but now I realize that’s harmful so I just embrace the cave gollum look
I am white as paper, probably one of the palest people and I live in Asia and often get comment that I have the dream skin. While back at home my parents were teasing me about being a ghost and doctors asking am I sick. Interesting how it changes on cultural basis
I think it’s more than just cultural. Yes, it’s definitely a factor, and there are cultures and there were times where paper white was considered beautiful.
But I think on some level we naturally associate severe paleness with being sick or non-social.
Not sure really I am not an expert on this, where I live now and look at some of the wealthy people, they are extremely white like on purpose. Some of the leading politicians too. In fact, it's a bit difficult to find a very dark skinned celebrity or a powerful politician here, there are some but not many at all.
To me personally, I like naturally tan skin (like Asian natural skin) > natural white skin > artificial tanned skin > heavy tanning. Tanned white people just do not look good to me.
If you asked someone else where I live now, I bet answer would be different
To me, something like RFK Junior skin looks disgusting. I always wince when I see a picture of him, like you could make that into leather bag.
The mood is probably part light and part vitamin D. The latter can be supplemented. The former can be reproduced with a full spectrum bright lamp or brief sun exposure in the morning.
I mean sort of but you should probably just get some sun if you can. There’s such a thing as too much tanning, sure, but getting no sun is not healthy either.
Exposing large amounts of skin to the sun has other health risks when it is freezing outside. :)
Vitamin D deficiency is very common in Canada particularly during winter. The government recommends that everyone intentionally seek out vitamin D rich foods, or to take a supplement.
Possibly. Its actually insanely frustrating as someone pale that most western brands rarely approach the level of lightness I need to match my skin, and the few that come close often are almost always rather saturated, highly warm tones.
They almost always just stick to tones within the realm of pantone's skin guide, treating it more like a skin bible instead.
Haus labs and their triclone in 000 is one of the few foundations I've ever had match.
Tanning causes melanocyte production in your epidermis. Melanotan causes it throughout your body in an uncontrolled manner. In a wide variety of unrelated tissues.
It can lead to uncontrolled melanocyte production that doesn't shut off - cancer. Aggressive melanomas.
It disrupts normal hormone signalling which may downstream cause a variety of deleterious health effects and disease states.
There are also crazy reports of kidney failure, which may or may not be caused by the drug.
Second paragraph mentions "regulatory restrictions".
Clinuvel Pharmaceuticals intended to offer it as a cosmetic, but abandoned this pursuit in the 2000s due to regulatory restrictions and concerns about the promotion of suntanning. Unlicensed Melanotan II is found on the internet, although health agencies advise against its use due to lack of testing and regulatory approval.
But that's the thing, it's not about "more melanin", but rather about something like:
The grass on the other side has a different amount of melanin be harder-to-achieve and thus more desirable because it previously signaled belonging to the higher socio-economical strata.
It's indeed, baffling, ignoring health consequences: Get fashionably darker skin now: Make your skin look (reasonably universally) irreversibly uglier/older gradually over time. This is perhaps the most controllable way to affect how old you look.
It becomes unmissable once someone is in their 30s: Some still have youthful skin, while others are wrinkly, splotched, and saggy.
I think people way over cook themselves. The economics and amplified power of tanning beds at salons push people to highly overdose.
I estimated that 1 minute of artificial tanning is comparable to the 10-15 minutes of sun a day that is recommended. But has the benefit of the whole body's largest organ kicking in for the health benefits. So I tan at home for 1 minute a couple times a week. You can't do this economically with a salon.
I don't really get tan, just a little more color. But when I do get any lengthy sun time due to outdoor activities, I tan quickly instead of burn.
I love the idea that we believe that we can replicate all of the natural processes involved in getting a tan, and to such a precision that we can then speed up the process 10 fold, and that we can fit it all into a single unit that can be wheeled in and out of the room.
Unless of course our calculations are a bit off, then we accidentally created a bed version of the wrong chalice from raiders of the lost ark, but I think it's fine.
Some cell and animal studies show that there is a slight possible effect. It hasn't been shown in humans, and even in extrapolation from animals, the protective benefit does not seem particularly significant.
Strong reaction? I don’t know anyone who would believe that.
I don’t think we need to replicate everything about nature to incorporate what we know about nature, ourselves, and the practical details of our lives.
I have bright LEDs around my ceilings, hidden by cove molding, turning the whole ceiling into soft but bright reflected daylight.
It doesn’t need to replicate a real summer day outside to improve my mood and avoid depression in winter. Much better than ordinary indoor lighting.
Most people take some kind of supplement or medication that doesn’t replicate pre-technological natural conditions but provide benefits.
Improving our respective conditions, in the artificial world we live in, can involve quirky adaptations for each of us.
Nude? :) I do think getting a bit of sun everywhere has to enhance the benefits. Thus my solution.
I also walk a lot when I can and weather allows. I started walking with a weighted vest occasionally and it was like my body went into some kind of good shock. I was surprised how little soreness or fatigue I felt even the first time, after a two hour walk wearing 20 lbs. And the physical energy boost was dramatic. I switched to 40 lbs the second time and since.
Sure! Walk out of the sauna, over the garden, down the dock, then jump into the lake for a naked swim.
Do that daily for about four weeks, come rain or shine, whilst enjoying your summer vacation.
Of course that probably doesn't work for every country, but here in Finland it's normal enough. Too bad I'm a pale-skinned redhead, covered in freckles, and I get burned if I'm not too careful.
> I do think getting a bit of sun everywhere has to enhance the benefit
Why? This is not how we naturally insolate.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just that the status quo is different parts of your body getting sun each day. You’re not replicating that, which places the burden of evidence on you.
Depends where you live but where I am it's not unacceptable to go for a run in essentially swim wear so you'd be sunning not much less than what you'd get in a public tanning salon
If you know something everyone else doesn't, it would be great to see your paper describing how you do that and demonstrating efficacy. So far, the evidence seems to suggest it's not sufficient: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X2...
> I estimated that 1 minute of artificial tanning is comparable to the 10-15 minutes of sun a day that is recommended.
That doesn't seem right. If you only tan in a strong tanning bed for 10 min (or 15 min in a weaker one), it's equivalent to only about an hour in the real sun around noon. I.e. if you've only been going to a tanning bed, you'll start to burn outdoors shortly after that. (And I'm talking about high-UVB bulbs that develop the long-lasting tan that protects against sunburn, just like the sun itself generates.)
So the difference factor is more like 4-6x, not 10-15x. Honestly, 15x would be insane. Tanning beds aren't as strong as some fearmongerers suggest. And that's assuming full-body exposure.
When you say you artificially tan at home for 1 minute, how? Did you buy your own entire tanning bed? Because if you use the small portable devices (like a Sperti), they're providing only a tiny fraction of what a tanning bed provides, since they're so small.
I think your calculations are good, that I am operating with a significant time safety margin.
I balanced going (1) “short” on time, (2) “long” on body coverage, and (3) with consistent exposure schedule, for best steady-state body adaptation (I.e. for both high repair and positive health responses). For plausibly higher safety plus higher benefit on all three counts.
Lucky you! So convenient. Yeah, then there's probably a good chance that's developing the vitamin D you need, although bulbs do take around 60 seconds to warm up to full brightness, but I'm just basing that off visual brightness and assuming that UV warm-up time is the same. I'm sure getting your vitamin D levels tested will definitely tell you if you're getting enough or not. If not, well you can always do 2 min, but blood tests give you the definitive answer there.
We can do better than "known for decades, on a layman's level" folklore and the answer actually isn't as straightforward ([1]). Recently there's even been discussion (by a Brit scientist I believe but I have no reference) on skin cancer vs more serious forms of cancer, and also about skin pigmentation playing a role here.
I actually live in southern Europe and most of my friends who are >35 and have been out and about for most of their lives do indeed look much older than they are.
I think that’s because locals have some level of adaptation to their region. In Australia, you can really see how the high levels of sunshine affect the Northern Europe descendants who live there today. Some 30 yo women look easily 40.
"known" is the wrong word. Laymen know a lot of things, like ingesting lead, radium, mercury and arsenic. Up until a couple of years ago, people "knew" that one glass of wine a day was healthy, when infact every drop is poisonous to the body.
In reverse, people thought (and too many still "know") that MSG and pasteurization is bad.
Don't use the word know, when in fact you mean "assume".
Is MSG not bad for you in the way aspartame is not bad for you? I totally get that MSG is naturally present in dashi but the chemistry of dashi (a very messy and complex mix of substances) vs purified msg is going to be different, and the concentrations the japanese consume food containing dashi are very different to the way UPFs and chinese restaurants gratuitously smother your food in it. MSG is to many cuisines what butter is to western cuisine (ie moar is always bettah)
There’s no evidence linking MSG specifically with any chronic health issues and little reason to suspect there would be in healthy people at the quantities generally consumed. Funnily enough many people who are wary of MSG and try to avoid it would be better off looking at their sodium intake, which we know for sure has long term health risks.
I am someone who is sensitive to MSG and the new substitutes they put in food to replace it.
It is not "dangerous", and I think that is the problem with the messaging, but it does increase my anxiety, insomnia and fibromyalgia symptoms. And I also thing for most people it is fine, but it certainly does not work with my family's genetics. My mother had the same issue.
Many things in food now replace MSG. Any time you see a protein isolate, what they are isolating is the glutamate. Malted Barley Flour also contains high levels of glutamate and purines (like inosine) that work synergisticly with it to enhance flavor.
Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and it makes your taste buds more "excited". My mouth tastes like metal whenever I have foods with glutamate. It is not pleasant for me at all.
Well it seems pretty accepted that refined sugar is worse for you than consuming sugars locked up in fibrous fruits. From a similar intuition glutamates locked up in natural sources probably has a different bioavailability profile to refined MSG, incidental sodium intake notwithstanding.
In any case, everyone is different and catchall health advice lacks nuance. I have to very consciously consume more and more salt because I habitually cut it out to the point that I now suffer from hyponatremia especially as I exercise and sweat bucket loads.
salt was always advised to be limited, especially for those with high blood pressure. This hasn't changed, there are just vocal diet ideologues (mostly carnivore/keto) that are trying to post-hoc rationalize otherwise.
Everybody is sodium sensitive, it’s a basic fact that your body retains additional fluids if you increase your sodium intake, just talk to some bodybuilders. Chronic long term exposure to a high sodium diet is a risk factor for all sorts of issues because of this basic fact of biology. Way more so than MSG or even artificial sweeteners. But people focus on the wrong thing.
My understanding is that most people's blood pressure does not increase in response to dietary sodium, which is the sensitivity described in this context.
MSG is very safe in normal quantities with a similar safety profile to salt. You can drink MSG water to kill yourself but it’d be like drinking a gallon of seawater. It’s monosodium glutamate. Monosodium as in NaCl (table salt) and glutamate as in the amino acid and neurotransmitter. Once they disassociate in water, they’re both some of the most basic molecules used by all life, including for protein production.
A glass of wine a day is within epsilon of the most healthy possible option. You're making this out as if this is a big shift, but it isn't. There are just huge error bars on the measurements relative to the effect of the intervention.
There was this lady who started going to the tanning salon across the street from my place. In 4-5 months her skin had turned from pale white into tanned leather. It was shocking watching this happen.
The UVB portion of sunlight indirectly increases dopamine levels. You find it mainly near noon-day sunlight, and tanning beds. So the feel-good effects may encourage users to come back for more.
The UV damage from tanning beds has been well documented for decades, but what's novel here is the genetic methylation analysis showing accelerated aging at the DNA level.
What's wild to me is the economics. Tanning salons charge $30-50/month to give you skin cancer. Meanwhile vitamin D supplements cost $10/year and achieve the same health benefit people claim to seek from tanning.
The only rational argument I've heard for controlled UV exposure is building a base tan before vacation to prevent burning. But even then, 1-2 minutes in a low-wattage bed would suffice - not the 20+ minute sessions people actually do.
A Google search for vitamin d results in ads, ahem "sponsored results", for 180 servings for $27, which is about $55 for a full year assuming it's one serving per day, which is the same decimal order of magnitude as $10 (but, I suppose, since we are on HN, is three or four orders of magnitude in binary)
80-90% of the visible signs of ageing come from the sun. This is why, in older people, you'll find their body generally looks younger than their face. This is because clothes protected their body from the sun, but their faces were fully exposed.
Always wear sunscreen on your hands, face and neck every time you go outside. If you're the type of HN'er that is on the computer all day and rarely goes outside, doing this on the few occasions you do will take away one of the only opportunities the sun will have to age you.
A lot of people are already vitamin D deficient and avoiding sun or using sunscreen more will make it worse. The health risks and consequences are much greater than that of sun exposure, which is likely why sun exposure decreases cancer risk and mortality rates substantially, despite the increased risk of skin cancer.
looking young is a fine goal, but this advice is too general on a forum like this. The actual UV index varies wildly based on location and time of year.
Your advice would be crazy in seattle or london for example. Except summer time, or if one works outdoors.
You recommend I put on sunscreen when it’s cloudy, i can’t see the sun, and the weather app shows a UV index of 3? You did say “every time” lol. I’ve noticed people in this thread (not you specifically) don’t have the capacity for nuance on this subject. It’s baffling to me.
Questions people should ask themselves:
- how long will i be outside?
- is it early morning or early evening? if so sunscreen is pointless.
- what is the peak UV index in my location today? is it 2 or 11?
- am i genetically predisposed to skin cancer, or have very light skin?
Although I think the more interesting question is whether sunbed use increases or decreases overall mortality. The only study I can find is Lindqvist's:
Overall, sunbed use reduced the all-cause mortality by a ratio of 0.77 or 0.87 depending on the model used. It increased the risk of developing MM, and the risk of dying from MM, although all-cause mortality was not increased even in patients diagnosed with MM. (This seems to be because there is a very low overall risk of MM mortality, but UV light exposure seems to provide a greater overall health benefit than the small risk of increased MM risk).
"The young tanning bed users had more skin mutations than people twice their age, especially in their lower backs, an area that does not get much damage from sunlight but has a great deal of exposure from tanning beds."
So in other areas than the lower back, everyone - tan bed users or not - have these supposed seeds of melanoma as well? And that is for a much larger area of the skin than the one mentioned.
Also I wonder about the quote that a mutated cell can never go back. The immune system could kill the mutated cells and thereby promote the unmutated ones. Though nothing is perfect of course. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jan/analysis-protective-lung...
> The immune system could kill the mutated cells and thereby promote the unmutated ones.
This happens all the time. The mutated cells we see are the ones that immune system couldn't detect and kill. Fortunately they are still overwhelmingly non-cancerous, but unfortunately some might be.
Yes I agree, I was just responding the article's "“We cannot reverse a mutation once it occurs, ..." I don't think that is entirely accurate. Also, I think it is a dynamic process, so even cells the immune system hasn't killed yet could be found later. Or the mutation could cause other deviancies that will make the cell uncompetitive with healthy cells. But it is a slow process - it takes years for former smokers' lung cancer risk to return to near that of never smokers. And it probably never gets there - some mutated cells may never be detectable and there's clearly also a threshold beyond which the cancer is irreversible, at least without intervention.
If you travel around you can see with your own eyes that countries that have both A) more sun and B) culture of intentional exposure (e.g. at the beach) people by the age they're 40 have on average noticeably worse skin. More wrinkles, more dark patches etc.
Its like everyone's arguing we should optimally live in darkness. As if 1. Humans didnt evolve living outdoors, 2. Everyone ages at the same rate 3. If they did, no one would ever get MM again. Like many things across the universe, too much of a good thing becomes bad. And "too much" varies considerably from one individual to the next. And no one in their 80s who avoided exposure to the sun is without wrinkles.
I live in Ireland, there's practically 0 opportunity to get exposed to the sun unless you work outdoors, and even then only your face and hands and perhaps forearms get exposed. I just take vitamin D tablets.
Also I know UV goes through clouds, but when its raining all the time you tend to stay indoors and only go outside with raincoat / umbrella.
Melanotan makes your skin react to light more effectively and you can get a full tan quite quickly with it (even in a few days). I don't know whether that means it ages you less because it takes less UV exposure to get a good tan with it or if it has some other adverse side effect. But I have tried it once and it is definitely effective.
I assume both is unhealthy, but I also like to be tanned and take the risk. Preferably from safe sun, but when not possible I’m debating tanning bed vs Melatonan and I haven’t found evidence.
In my experience, people who tan know this but the argument is always they don’t care it’s part of life and it’s better to just enjoy now than spend time worrying about looking wrinkly in the future, because what’s the point of being old and having smooth perfect skin?
Fucking stupid, there is nothing better in life than looking young and beautiful forever IMO.
Most people can barely think a month ahead, they will wake up one day and be like oh shit why do I look so old and panic hard and do all sorts of surgeries, skin creams etc. nonsense while they could have just avoided the sun or used the suncreen..
Most people thinking aging is something that happens to other people, but that they will always pass for 20 something. Then they get offended when you correctly guess their age in the late 30s or 40s.
After workout, i sit in the mild sun each morning before having my breakfast and have done so for many years now. I live near Himalayas and sun is always there, except for some weeks of winter.
Funny timing, I just went to a tanning salon for the first time yesterday. I asked for the weakest bed (level 1), which has the most UVB (for vitamin D production). They were shocked that I wanted to use level 1, apparently no one uses it. They also suggested starting at 5 mins instead of the 1-2 minutes I wanted to do. The machine itself has a notice saying not to go over 3 mins for the first week.
I was following the protocol from this paper, which started people at 2 mins and used low wattage UVB-heavy bulbs.
Sunbeds with UVB radiation can produce physiological levels of serum 25-Hydroxyvitamin D in healthy volunteers
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5821157/
Unfortunately the Science Advances paper being discussed is epidemiological and doesn't distinguish between the type of bulb, length of time, and other parameters used while tanning. However it is safe to say that the average tanner cares more about getting dark than anything else.
I think there would actually be a market for vitamin D centered "healthy tanning" where only low wattage, high-UVB bulbs are used particularly in cloudy areas or where the winter is long. I'm that guessing the operating costs for that kind of business would be cheaper than your average tanning salon, too.
Interesting... What benefits does this have over vitamin D supplements?
I've seen this "optimising for some perceived negative effects" thing with toothbrushes/toothpaste, where "whitening" and stiff bristles actually just means removing more (irreplaceable) enamel from your teeth.
Many people with inflammatory disease like IBD can't absorb oral vitamin D properly
Even in healthy people, oral vitamin D is not always sufficient (there was a study done in Japan where sunlight is low but Vitamin D from fish is high - can't find it right now) and sunlight exposure might have other benefits than vitamin D anyway
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X2...
Vitamin D supplements are controversial on their own.
There is ample results on better health correlated with higher levels of Vitamin D, but the reverse is far more teneous: shoving in Vitamin D isn't guaranteed to be properly absorbed, and even when it is we don't see conparable results to people producing the Vitamin D themselves.
An example: https://academic.oup.com/jbmr/article/38/10/1391/7610360
The paper you linked is saying there is no benefit in Vitamin D supplementation in people who are not Vitamin D deficient. Which is not surprising.
Do you have research showing sunlight Vitamin D has benefit for someone who is not deficient?
Unless you are deficient it's not the vitamin D. It's a whole host of other processes that benefit your body from sun exposure and the activities that go along with it. The Vitamin D is just a marker that we can detect that can also be related to that same exposure. So there's a huge number of things for which people with high levels of Vitamin D do not suffer but supplementing has no effect because the vitamin D is only correlated not causative.
But wouldn’t this imply that optimizing the tanning bed properties for vitamin D production is worse than looking for as-close-to-sun-like sources of light?
Yes, there's much more to sunlight than vitamin D so a more generic "almost the sun" source of light could be overall better.
Even just for vitamins, many precursor are found related to light: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2023-4698
The paper covers a lot, some are administrating vitamin D as a prevention measure, most are on vitamin D deficient patients. e.g
> Even in the small subgroup of subjects with a poorer vitamin D status (serum 25OHD < 20 ng/mL), no effect on fracture risk was observed (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.07; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.91–1.25).
> A large RCT in Mongolian children with severe vitamin D deficiency did not find a beneficial effect of vitamin D supplementation on the subsequent risk of subclinical or clinical tuberculosis.
I have issues with low vitamin D and even really high supplement doses like 10,000iu/d do nothing at all- my level keeps dropping no matter how much I supplement. Sunlight brings it up quickly but not in the winter from Nov-Jan.
Vitamin D supplements don’t work consistently across different populations. Very few (~10%) of people can absorb dietary vitamin D. If you aren’t some form of Northern European, you probably need to take at least 10 times the daily recommended dose of vitamin D to influence your levels significantly.
Most people need sun!
Don't most people who take supplements just take 10X the RDA? It is still a tiny amount of supplement that is safer and costs a fraction of the indoor tanning or traveling often to somewhere with adequate Sun.
I’ve never talked to someone supplementing vitamin D who was aware at all.
I think that the correct approach would be start at 10x vitamin D with baseline bloodwork and adjust dosage from there.
But yeah I’m in the camp of “sun is good for you, in most cases.” I would be very unsurprised to find that there are precursor hormones released beyond vitamin D that impact efficacy. We don’t really understand the endocrine system very well.
I think that because we can see and understand the dermatological effects we overly weight them. Anecdotally older people I know who have not avoided the sun seem much better off mentally and physically, but I think because there isn’t a measurable reason we’re aware of, we completely discount any benefit.
Stiff bristles also damage your gum more easily and can lead to gum recessions. I needed gum transplants because of this and a wrong brushing technique. For me even medium stiffness is too hard.
What's old is new again:
https://img.ifunny.co/images/5ab4dda29b9dd88acc439076537e0c4...
as a man of south asian descent growing up in massachusetts, I would find myself getting very depressed around the middle of the winter. I actually found a huge amount of relief by going into a sunbed for 2 min a month. I'd feel much better and my cravings would change from fried food to salads.
I looked into this extensively during lockdowns. There is a specific wavelength that maximises Vitamin D. And there are medically approved devices that use special fluorescent bulbs that output this. It's mainly used in Nordic countries.
I tried to find an LED strip equivalent but couldn't not - there are strips that produce a lower wavelength than UV-A but from what I remember it was too low of a nm for good vitamin D.
Could be an interesting product however ! I wanted to hand two strips in my shower and turn them on for a few minutes while I washed up during the winter.
Unfortunately even the tanning beds you were using still produce a lot of UV-A which will age your skin. And funnily enough UV-B also produces a much longer lasting tan (though slower) which would mean less return trips for people who are just looking for aesthetics
I do exactly what you are describing and it seems to work for me, from a vitamin D perspective. I started this because I read a paper stating the same health benefits were not seen from supplements as with people who got the vitamin D from sunlight. I believe that is true, but of course can not be certain.
I use the Sperti Vitamin D sunlamp at home during the winter months. It wasn't cheap but wasn't crazy expensive either and seems to be what you want (e.g. UVB).
It's $640.
https://www.sperti.com/product/sperti-vitamin-d-light-box/
There are handheld UVB 311 nm dispensers, which are not as efficient as whole UVB spectrum for Vitamin D production but still work and are safer.
https://www.dermahealer.com/products/dermahealer-uvb-light-t...
https://heymedsupply.com/kernel-corded-handheld-311nm-narrow...
I might use one of those for most days and a lizard UV lamp one day a week too (1 minute)
But if you find a more affordable to the Sperti please let me know
Well, the 'active ingredient' in these things is the bulb and a reputable brand (Philips medical) runs about 150 euros for a 100w tube with a R17d plug:
https://www.francelampes.com/en/30214-r17d-tl-100w-01-uvb-17...
You then just need the right ballast for it and a basic timer, maybe a reflector and stand and you're in business. Getting smaller qty is going to be an issue since these suppliers tend to sell in packs of 10.
Apparently the a ballast runs about 70 euros and can power two bulbs.
I might look into it since it's down right affordable compared to the alternatives.
There's a history of finding really strong correlations between vitamin D levels and (many kinds of) health, and then disappointing results for RCTs of vitamin D supplementation. There are lots of possible explanations of this, but it seems like a plausible one is that there are some good things sunlight does for you other than produce vitamin D. So I'm a little nervous about everyone eliminating all sun exposure and then taking vitamin D geltabs to compensate, even though sunlight carries some risks. (But obviously too much ionizing radiation is also a problem, and it sounds like most users of tanning beds are getting a lot of intense exposure)
I wonder how much correlation this has with exercise. Generally if you are getting good levels of sunlight, there is a good chance you are outside exercising, even if it's just walking.
After all, exercise is the undisputed God tier all-time winning champion of "Studies show that ______ is good for xyz."
I've taken up running because it's a way to get sunlight during the winter, I can run in shorts and a t shirt. I am very active, but I start getting a lot of anxiety if I don't get sunlight on my skin for a week or two.
I remember a study where they shone light on the back of the knee to control for this.
While I believe there are many benefits of being outside and exercising, there does appear to be specific benefits to sun-like UV exposure.
Also gives you a brief respite from sitting in a climate-controlled environment and staring at screens.
UVA triggers the release of nitric oxide from the skin into the bloodstream. This causes blood vessels to dilate, lowering blood pressure and improving circulation.
Exposure to sunlight (or lack of it) affects our circadian rhythm and production of melatonin, which affects our sleep quality. Exposure to morning sun in particular is linked with better sleep quality, leading to better health.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12502225/
> There's a history of finding really strong correlations between vitamin D levels and (many kinds of) health, and then disappointing results for RCTs of vitamin D supplementation.
This might just mean that bodies that are healthier in many other aspects are also better at managing their vitamin D stores which isn't all that surprising.
Some of the positive sunlight exposure benefits are trivial to see.
- running around outside, because physical activity if healthy
- spending an afternoon in the company of good friends or family
- gardening, which can produce veggies that are pesticide free
Not everything is a biochemical direct benefit of the sun’s rays. Some of the positive effects are a few steps removed.
There are plenty of foods with vitamin D. You don't actually need to supplement it unless you're a vegetarian, you just need to actively include those foods in your diet.
The current argument I've read for why fair-skinned people even evolved near the North Sea and not anywhere else near the arctic is exactly that the Gulf Stream allowed a cereals-based diet rather than a meat based diet, which led to vitamin D deficiencies which caused problems in pregnancy, leading to people with fairer skin being the most likely to avoid those problems.
You definitely don't need to get your vitamin D from the sun.
I don't know where you read that fair skin is a diet adaptation and not a sunlight one, but that's wrong: fair skin is an adaptation to northern latitudes due to reduced sunlight. The majority of people of African descent in America are vitamin D deficient, but in Ghana — where there is much poorer nutrition, but more sunlight — they're not. Meanwhile, the majority of white Americans are not vitamin D deficient. [1]
Getting sufficient vitamin D takes 6x longer sun exposure for black people than for white people. [2] In northern latitudes that's pretty difficult.
1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7913332/
2: https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2011/09/20/vitamin-d/
> There are plenty of foods with vitamin D.
My favorite one that I read about is mushrooms. If you grow them in the sun, some species allegedly acquire vitamin D. I am not sure how much nor if this is truly effective, but it gives me a good excuse to grow various mushrooms next spring.
You might be interested in the British history of Vitamin D supplementation. It all started with kids in the cities getting rickets because the pollution (smog) was that bad that they never got to see further than a metre or two during the worst of it. The way to get around was by taking the tram as that had rails to guide it through the 'pea soupers'.
So they put the kids on trains and took them off to the seaside.
But then...
The railway also allowed milk to be brought into the cities. So they added vitamin D to milk. That was how the rickets was solved. In time milk became free at school, usually it was warm by morning break, which was when it would get consumed, from mini-milk bottles, that would get reused.
I am only piecing together this history, no definitive source, unless you include my elderly neighbour. However, food history is fascinating, once you get away from celebrated brands to the unsung heroes of the vegetable aisle.
What I can't work out is why the children were so vulnerable to rickets when the adults weren't. Workers weren't being sent out to the countryside or beach to get some sun, just the kids. Rickets doesn't affect adults with grown bones, in theory, the adults should have had really painful joints and osteoporosis, but maybe this was not understood at the time.
In time the clean air zones were setup and the smog was banished to a certain extent, by which time it became uncommon to fortify milk with vitamin D. Finally we had Margaret Thatcher, famously the 'milk snatcher', for stopping free school milk.
In the UK we do get vitamin D randomly added to processed foods (what else?) and this is a scattergun approach to fortifying the population. If you don't eat processed foods then you are not going to get any of that processed food fortification goodness.
Then there are the animal corpse sources, as in oily fish and whatnot. If you eat any diet except for whole-food-plant-based vegan, then you are going to get vitamin D either through dead animal or fortification. Vegetarians just have to eat maaassivve blocks of cheese, which they will, with a few eggs and some breakfast cereal to get their vitamin D needs roughly covered. Junk-food vegans should get some vitamin D goodness from fortifications too, particularly if they consume things like 'oat milk' (as if oats have mammary glands). Pure junk food, a.k.a. 'Standard American Diet', should also be pretty good for vitamin D.
So this only really leaves the whole-food, plant-based, everything-cooked-from-scratch vegan diet as lacking, at least as far as the winter months is concerned. Was this a problem historically? I don't think so. Since people used to work the fields, they had plenty of vitamin D to carry over for winter.
Before we had 'modern day racism' in the UK, we had a situation where the aristocracy had white skin and everyone else had leathery brown skin, from working outside. White skin was proof that you didn't have to work the fields and therefore, you were higher status. Racism pre-dated racism, if you get my drift, it was mere class-based xenophobia back then. To be 'truly white' you had to have no tan.
Since meat was hard to come by, peasants were 95% vegan by default, yet working the fields, so vitamin D deficiency was not a problem, for the 1% aristocracy (since they had their oily fish, red meat and dairy) or for the 99% that had to spend lots of time outdoors.
I am not sure where you are coming from regarding the Gulf Stream and cereals. The Fertile Crescent was where farming began for Europe, with wheat not actually growing in the UK and other grains (barley) being the chosen grain. It was only with the Norman Conquest that wheat made it to the UK.
When the Romans made it to the UK they were perplexed at what they found. There were two tribes, the nomadic cattle types and the hill fort living grain growers that were not nomadic. The hill forts got in the way of the migration routes between pastures. The Romans were disgusted by the milk drinking since nobody would do that in Rome, where everyone was lactose intolerant, unlike the Celts.
> What I can't work out is why the children were so vulnerable to rickets when the adults weren't
Presumably, children need regular and consistent amounts due to bone growth. Once past puberty, less mineralization of calcium and phosphate happens, which is one of the processes in the body that requires vitamin D.
> The railway also allowed milk to be brought into the cities. So they added vitamin D to milk.
That and (later) refrigeration allowed dairy products to be transported to the cities, which helped with calcium intake, as well as vitamin D.
There is probably stuff we don’t know. For example, some people sneeze when they look or are exposed to the sun (for me, usually in the morning). There is still no scientific explanation for why it happens.
There are no devices that can produce a full-spectrum light like the one you get from the sun. So my suggestion would be to go outside and breathe instead of sitting in a box.
Here’s a podcast on this:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/podcast...
There are multiple studies showing infrared enhances mythocondria function, and this is already used therapeutically.
Today is the first time in December my town gets any sunlight and boy am I excited. Not because we are that far north, it's still the height of the winter after all, it was just shit weather.
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Excessive UV exposure in general not a great time, tanning is just a way of speedrunning damage unless done in very short intervals.
I'll never understand some people's fetishization with getting darker via tanning though. Theres nothing wrong with light skin, its only a few western countries that seem to have a weird fetishization with cooking your skin longterm to get darker short term. Meanwhile most other countries and peoples are willing to damage their skin in whole other ways trying to get the opposite.
They're both imitations of status symbols
"wealthy people can stay inside while poor people work in the sun" vs. "wealthy people can vacation in sunny countries while poor people stay home in the cold"
The US has 200 million white people that live in a mostly warm and sunny climate. Women often tan before vacations or events so they look better in the pictures.
I live in Asia and I think tanned white people do not look good at all most of the time, to me it just looks weird. I much prefer the pale look. People with naturally tan skin however I think look very good.
It's 100% cultural. I think the pale look is super unattractive and ghostly/ghoulish. Tanned skin is beautiful.
It's not that it is a sign of wealth due to leisure. People who work outdoors are tanned too. It's the warmness. The glowing. The gradients. Something impressed upon me at a young age that this is the standard of beauty.
When I'm in Asia and I see people carrying umbrellas and doing skincare, their skin looks clinical and less appealing to me than those who aren't doing it. I logically know the anti-sun regime is healthier for their skin, but my primate brain tells me it's unattractive.
It's unfortunate that increasing melanin production from the sun causes DNA damage. Because it looks so good to me.
There are a variety of drugs that induce pigmentation or melanocyte production, but none are FDA approved. Most of them can lead to cancer, either by uncontrolled cell proliferation, impact on unrelated cell populations, or disrupting normal hormonal signalling.
Melanotan-II was popular some years back, but there are half a dozen others that use a variety of different mechanisms. None of them are approved.
It's unfortunate that we haven't developed something better than exposing ourselves to DNA damage, but it's probably not the biggest priority.
I grew up in Northern Europe and I still think when people back home do tanning it looks so bad and makes them look super old. They look much better with the natural skin as it's not damaged and it's kind of even. Like I see women in their 20s easily looking like 35 no kidding. I am glad I avoided the sun from young age so I get comments now in my 30s that I look like early 20s which is mostly due to the skin.
Like sometimes I watch American news and the fake tans are just yucky and kind of gross to me.
Same with western women I see in Asia occasionally, age in 20s but looks easily 30+ while it's the opposite with many Asians. Eastern Europeans tend to avoid the sun more.
I don't know if it's every Asian country, but Thailand absolutely has an obsession with skin whitening products (whiter skin is correlated with wealth/higher-class and not having to work outside). I found it hard to find a non-whitening lotion while there actually. I really doubt many of these products are safe and it looks very uncanny-valley and weird to me, which is maybe what you're picking up on as unattractive too. Definitely a cultural thing.
The women look much much younger than western equivalents though because they avoid the sun. It's hard to look at western girls in twenties who look like they are in their mid 30s. However, the western girls who have used sunscreen tend to look super good with the original skin.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the overcooked look either. The damage really adds up quick, I doubt many look ahead to their 40s-50s while torching their 20s away though (something something youth wasted on the young)
It's the same in the Philippines. Try finding soap, lotion, or sunscreen that doesn't include whitening agents, which are usually very unhealthy for the skin.
It's very much the case that in the Philippines, lighter skin is viewed as upper class haciendero/mestizo culture (not having to work outdoors, not being a nanny, maid, or "helper"). It's the same in many other Asian cultures. Women who live in Asian countries with a high concentration of plastic surgery "procedures" and treatments (like South Korea, for instance) are often the standards of beauty for other Asian countries even though such procedures/whitening and eye/nose surgeries are out of reach.
Men (7.4%) and women (11.5%) both do it, but yes women in the US in larger numbers. Worth mentioning it’s still a substantial % of men.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5664932/#:~:text=9....
What do you think those numbers represent? Just so everyone is clear, it's still 12% when we are talking about females who frequently outdoor tan of all races with half the group over 45 years old in a tiny test group. Not exactly relevant
You are welcome to provide your own source equal in quality to the NIH’s research.
People also tan before going on sunny vacations to get a “base” and prevent extreme burns. See: flights back to the Midwest from Miami after Spring Break.
So deeply unscientific. All tanning is evidence of damage.
The popularity of tanning is attributed to fashion designer Coco Chanel, who accidentally got too much sun on a Mediterranean cruise in 1923. Since she was a fashion icon, this made the tanned look fashionable.
As an aside, the chemistry behind UV damage is interesting. You can think of DNA as a sequence of four letters: C, G, A, and T. If there are two neighboring T's, UV can move a bond, linking the two T's together (i.e. thymine dimerization). If you're in the sun, each skin cell gets 50-100 of these pairs created per second. Enzymes usually fix these errors, but sometimes the errors will cause problems during DNA replication and you can end up with mutations. Enough of the wrong mutations can cause skin cancer. So wear sunscreen!
https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/91
It's too late to edit my previous comment, but I wanted to add one more random tanning fact: UV releases β-endorphin so tanning is literally addictive, to the point that naloxone will cause withdrawal symptoms, at least in mice: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(14)00611-4
I’m naturally pretty pale and don’t get much sunlight, I feel like I look like shit unless I get just a little bit of tan. What most people would consider just a healthy looking “baseline”. It also puts me in a better mood although that may be entirely psychological.
When I was younger I used to intentionally tan for short durations, but now I realize that’s harmful so I just embrace the cave gollum look
I am white as paper, probably one of the palest people and I live in Asia and often get comment that I have the dream skin. While back at home my parents were teasing me about being a ghost and doctors asking am I sick. Interesting how it changes on cultural basis
I think it’s more than just cultural. Yes, it’s definitely a factor, and there are cultures and there were times where paper white was considered beautiful.
But I think on some level we naturally associate severe paleness with being sick or non-social.
I say this as the original commenter
Not sure really I am not an expert on this, where I live now and look at some of the wealthy people, they are extremely white like on purpose. Some of the leading politicians too. In fact, it's a bit difficult to find a very dark skinned celebrity or a powerful politician here, there are some but not many at all.
To me personally, I like naturally tan skin (like Asian natural skin) > natural white skin > artificial tanned skin > heavy tanning. Tanned white people just do not look good to me.
If you asked someone else where I live now, I bet answer would be different
To me, something like RFK Junior skin looks disgusting. I always wince when I see a picture of him, like you could make that into leather bag.
Just eat/drink a lot of carrots instead.
Orange is the new tan?
The mood is probably part light and part vitamin D. The latter can be supplemented. The former can be reproduced with a full spectrum bright lamp or brief sun exposure in the morning.
I've tried all kinds of Vitamin D/bright bulbs/staring at the sun over the years and they do nothing for my mood
I mean sort of but you should probably just get some sun if you can. There’s such a thing as too much tanning, sure, but getting no sun is not healthy either.
Be sure you're taking care of your skin doing it, though. Get the good European sunscreens and so on, you don't want to age yourself prematurely.
Why don't you just spend time outside a little bit?
Exposing large amounts of skin to the sun has other health risks when it is freezing outside. :)
Vitamin D deficiency is very common in Canada particularly during winter. The government recommends that everyone intentionally seek out vitamin D rich foods, or to take a supplement.
Cosmetic companies to blame? In the east, they fetishize white / fair skin, while in the west they fetishize dark skin.
Possibly. Its actually insanely frustrating as someone pale that most western brands rarely approach the level of lightness I need to match my skin, and the few that come close often are almost always rather saturated, highly warm tones.
They almost always just stick to tones within the realm of pantone's skin guide, treating it more like a skin bible instead.
Haus labs and their triclone in 000 is one of the few foundations I've ever had match.
People with dark skin do also still struggle to find their tones in most western countries unless they live in a huge city.
No, people who do it are to blame.
You can always use Melanotan II instead to get a good tan while also increasing libido and sleep quality; )
BEWARE.
Melanotan is dangerous, sadly.
Tanning causes melanocyte production in your epidermis. Melanotan causes it throughout your body in an uncontrolled manner. In a wide variety of unrelated tissues.
It can lead to uncontrolled melanocyte production that doesn't shut off - cancer. Aggressive melanomas.
It disrupts normal hormone signalling which may downstream cause a variety of deleterious health effects and disease states.
There are also crazy reports of kidney failure, which may or may not be caused by the drug.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7148395/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23121206/
https://www.actasdermo.org/en-eruptive-dysplastic-nevi-follo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanotan_II says it is banned in the United States, and anything you get on the black market isn't guaranteed to be pure.
Where does it say it's banned?
Second paragraph mentions "regulatory restrictions".
Clinuvel Pharmaceuticals intended to offer it as a cosmetic, but abandoned this pursuit in the 2000s due to regulatory restrictions and concerns about the promotion of suntanning. Unlicensed Melanotan II is found on the internet, although health agencies advise against its use due to lack of testing and regulatory approval.
It’s banned for cosmetic use. You can still buy it as a “research chemical”.
Do not buy it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46345971
I’m pretty sure Melanotan carries the risk of retinal pigmentation, or at least that was the case with the original. Not sure if II is different.
> I'll never understand some people's fetishization with getting darker
> ...
> Meanwhile most other countries and peoples are willing to damage their skin in whole other ways trying to get the opposite.
The grass has more melanin on the other side.
But that's the thing, it's not about "more melanin", but rather about something like:
The grass on the other side has a different amount of melanin be harder-to-achieve and thus more desirable because it previously signaled belonging to the higher socio-economical strata.
It's indeed, baffling, ignoring health consequences: Get fashionably darker skin now: Make your skin look (reasonably universally) irreversibly uglier/older gradually over time. This is perhaps the most controllable way to affect how old you look.
It becomes unmissable once someone is in their 30s: Some still have youthful skin, while others are wrinkly, splotched, and saggy.
I often see women in their mid 20s looking like 35 simply because of the skin.
I saw a paper that shows that peole find contrasts attractive. I can't find it, but here's the same finding for salads https://www.sciencedirect.com:5037/science/article/abs/pii/S...
Blond hair with a tan or black hair with white skin are more contrasting so look more striking.
> I'll never understand some people's fetishization with getting darker via tanning though
While some darker skin people want to have lighter skin.
Maybe at some deeper level it’s something about being human. We always want something the other person has
I'm pretty sure it's just cultural. They don't want to be fairer, or darker, they want the social status that it, allegedly, signals.
> We always want something the other person has
This. Same with curly vs straight hair.
The book by Dr. Seuss, “The Star Bellied Sneetches” explorers the phenomenon.
And what's funny is Western countries idolise tanned skin whereas Asian countries tend to idolise lighter skin.
I've never seen anyone look better after tanning.
I think people way over cook themselves. The economics and amplified power of tanning beds at salons push people to highly overdose.
I estimated that 1 minute of artificial tanning is comparable to the 10-15 minutes of sun a day that is recommended. But has the benefit of the whole body's largest organ kicking in for the health benefits. So I tan at home for 1 minute a couple times a week. You can't do this economically with a salon.
I don't really get tan, just a little more color. But when I do get any lengthy sun time due to outdoor activities, I tan quickly instead of burn.
I love the idea that we believe that we can replicate all of the natural processes involved in getting a tan, and to such a precision that we can then speed up the process 10 fold, and that we can fit it all into a single unit that can be wheeled in and out of the room.
Unless of course our calculations are a bit off, then we accidentally created a bed version of the wrong chalice from raiders of the lost ark, but I think it's fine.
Replicate the natural processes? It's literally just UV light.
UV comes in an huge variety of strengths outdoors.
There are no calculations to be a "bit off". It's just strong UV. You're making it sound a lot more complicated than it is.
Sun also emits infrared which seems to cause positive effects counteracting some of the UV related problems.
Some cell and animal studies show that there is a slight possible effect. It hasn't been shown in humans, and even in extrapolation from animals, the protective benefit does not seem particularly significant.
Yeah. There are so many variables already. From angle to time of year to skin pigment to duration
> I love the idea that we believe…
Strong reaction? I don’t know anyone who would believe that.
I don’t think we need to replicate everything about nature to incorporate what we know about nature, ourselves, and the practical details of our lives.
I have bright LEDs around my ceilings, hidden by cove molding, turning the whole ceiling into soft but bright reflected daylight.
It doesn’t need to replicate a real summer day outside to improve my mood and avoid depression in winter. Much better than ordinary indoor lighting.
Most people take some kind of supplement or medication that doesn’t replicate pre-technological natural conditions but provide benefits.
Improving our respective conditions, in the artificial world we live in, can involve quirky adaptations for each of us.
I just walk outdoors.
Nude? :) I do think getting a bit of sun everywhere has to enhance the benefits. Thus my solution.
I also walk a lot when I can and weather allows. I started walking with a weighted vest occasionally and it was like my body went into some kind of good shock. I was surprised how little soreness or fatigue I felt even the first time, after a two hour walk wearing 20 lbs. And the physical energy boost was dramatic. I switched to 40 lbs the second time and since.
Sure! Walk out of the sauna, over the garden, down the dock, then jump into the lake for a naked swim.
Do that daily for about four weeks, come rain or shine, whilst enjoying your summer vacation.
Of course that probably doesn't work for every country, but here in Finland it's normal enough. Too bad I'm a pale-skinned redhead, covered in freckles, and I get burned if I'm not too careful.
I too have played My Summer Car
I would love to live like that.
> I do think getting a bit of sun everywhere has to enhance the benefit
Why? This is not how we naturally insolate.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just that the status quo is different parts of your body getting sun each day. You’re not replicating that, which places the burden of evidence on you.
I am not making a scientific claim, or advising people. Just describing a personal judgement call and it’s informal reasoning.
There isn’t any burden for me to carry here.
Nor am I concerned by your apostate heretical state of disbelief. The persecution only confirms the holiness of my cause.
Disclaimer: My opinions are simply my own, and do not, in any way, reflect the views of my past or future selves, beyond a five minute interval.
Depends where you live but where I am it's not unacceptable to go for a run in essentially swim wear so you'd be sunning not much less than what you'd get in a public tanning salon
There are tan-thru clothes, if you want to be serious about it.
This isn't super useful for UV exposure in winter, due to low angle of the sun, clouds, and of course clothing.
I just take vitamins if needed, saves time and no cancer.
If you know something everyone else doesn't, it would be great to see your paper describing how you do that and demonstrating efficacy. So far, the evidence seems to suggest it's not sufficient: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X2...
The tricky part is defining "needed".
After all, supplements are also artificial compounds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33584011
> I estimated that 1 minute of artificial tanning is comparable to the 10-15 minutes of sun a day that is recommended.
That doesn't seem right. If you only tan in a strong tanning bed for 10 min (or 15 min in a weaker one), it's equivalent to only about an hour in the real sun around noon. I.e. if you've only been going to a tanning bed, you'll start to burn outdoors shortly after that. (And I'm talking about high-UVB bulbs that develop the long-lasting tan that protects against sunburn, just like the sun itself generates.)
So the difference factor is more like 4-6x, not 10-15x. Honestly, 15x would be insane. Tanning beds aren't as strong as some fearmongerers suggest. And that's assuming full-body exposure.
When you say you artificially tan at home for 1 minute, how? Did you buy your own entire tanning bed? Because if you use the small portable devices (like a Sperti), they're providing only a tiny fraction of what a tanning bed provides, since they're so small.
I have a standing tanning machine.
I think your calculations are good, that I am operating with a significant time safety margin.
I balanced going (1) “short” on time, (2) “long” on body coverage, and (3) with consistent exposure schedule, for best steady-state body adaptation (I.e. for both high repair and positive health responses). For plausibly higher safety plus higher benefit on all three counts.
> I have a standing tanning machine.
Lucky you! So convenient. Yeah, then there's probably a good chance that's developing the vitamin D you need, although bulbs do take around 60 seconds to warm up to full brightness, but I'm just basing that off visual brightness and assuming that UV warm-up time is the same. I'm sure getting your vitamin D levels tested will definitely tell you if you're getting enough or not. If not, well you can always do 2 min, but blood tests give you the definitive answer there.
how do you tan at home? you bought some UVB bulbs?
A standing tanning machine.
I suppose the specifics are novel enough to warrant a paper, but on a layman’s level it has been known for decades that UV ages your skin rapidly.
We can do better than "known for decades, on a layman's level" folklore and the answer actually isn't as straightforward ([1]). Recently there's even been discussion (by a Brit scientist I believe but I have no reference) on skin cancer vs more serious forms of cancer, and also about skin pigmentation playing a role here.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X2...
Yeah of course scientists can still learn more, but at some point the layman can’t really get any new information from the press release.
That link does not refute the claim that UV ages your skin, which it unquestionably does.
I don’t think it’s super straightforward. Another thing laymen know: Most younger people in southern Europe don’t look old.
I actually live in southern Europe and most of my friends who are >35 and have been out and about for most of their lives do indeed look much older than they are.
I think that’s because locals have some level of adaptation to their region. In Australia, you can really see how the high levels of sunshine affect the Northern Europe descendants who live there today. Some 30 yo women look easily 40.
"known" is the wrong word. Laymen know a lot of things, like ingesting lead, radium, mercury and arsenic. Up until a couple of years ago, people "knew" that one glass of wine a day was healthy, when infact every drop is poisonous to the body.
In reverse, people thought (and too many still "know") that MSG and pasteurization is bad.
Don't use the word know, when in fact you mean "assume".
Is MSG not bad for you in the way aspartame is not bad for you? I totally get that MSG is naturally present in dashi but the chemistry of dashi (a very messy and complex mix of substances) vs purified msg is going to be different, and the concentrations the japanese consume food containing dashi are very different to the way UPFs and chinese restaurants gratuitously smother your food in it. MSG is to many cuisines what butter is to western cuisine (ie moar is always bettah)
There’s no evidence linking MSG specifically with any chronic health issues and little reason to suspect there would be in healthy people at the quantities generally consumed. Funnily enough many people who are wary of MSG and try to avoid it would be better off looking at their sodium intake, which we know for sure has long term health risks.
I am someone who is sensitive to MSG and the new substitutes they put in food to replace it.
It is not "dangerous", and I think that is the problem with the messaging, but it does increase my anxiety, insomnia and fibromyalgia symptoms. And I also thing for most people it is fine, but it certainly does not work with my family's genetics. My mother had the same issue.
Many things in food now replace MSG. Any time you see a protein isolate, what they are isolating is the glutamate. Malted Barley Flour also contains high levels of glutamate and purines (like inosine) that work synergisticly with it to enhance flavor.
Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and it makes your taste buds more "excited". My mouth tastes like metal whenever I have foods with glutamate. It is not pleasant for me at all.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9883458/
https://www.eurofins.com/media-centre/newsletters/food-newsl...
Well it seems pretty accepted that refined sugar is worse for you than consuming sugars locked up in fibrous fruits. From a similar intuition glutamates locked up in natural sources probably has a different bioavailability profile to refined MSG, incidental sodium intake notwithstanding.
In any case, everyone is different and catchall health advice lacks nuance. I have to very consciously consume more and more salt because I habitually cut it out to the point that I now suffer from hyponatremia especially as I exercise and sweat bucket loads.
salt is bad again?
Salt's bad if you have sodium-responsive hypertension (maybe 30% of the population).
salt was always advised to be limited, especially for those with high blood pressure. This hasn't changed, there are just vocal diet ideologues (mostly carnivore/keto) that are trying to post-hoc rationalize otherwise.
From what I understand it's only really a problem for a specific set of high blood pressure folks. Something genetic I think.
I'm on blood pressure medication, and haven't received any advice about sodium intake.
Only ~50% of the population is hypertensive, and only about half of them are sodium sensitive.
Everybody is sodium sensitive, it’s a basic fact that your body retains additional fluids if you increase your sodium intake, just talk to some bodybuilders. Chronic long term exposure to a high sodium diet is a risk factor for all sorts of issues because of this basic fact of biology. Way more so than MSG or even artificial sweeteners. But people focus on the wrong thing.
My understanding is that most people's blood pressure does not increase in response to dietary sodium, which is the sensitivity described in this context.
And half of the half that are sensitive, it lowers blood pressure.
MSG is only bad for you because it makes things taste amazing so you are going to eat more than you actually should. Nothing wrong with butter btw.
As with most food stuffs if not consumed in moderation it can become a problem.
MSG is very safe in normal quantities with a similar safety profile to salt. You can drink MSG water to kill yourself but it’d be like drinking a gallon of seawater. It’s monosodium glutamate. Monosodium as in NaCl (table salt) and glutamate as in the amino acid and neurotransmitter. Once they disassociate in water, they’re both some of the most basic molecules used by all life, including for protein production.
A glass of wine a day is within epsilon of the most healthy possible option. You're making this out as if this is a big shift, but it isn't. There are just huge error bars on the measurements relative to the effect of the intervention.
There was this lady who started going to the tanning salon across the street from my place. In 4-5 months her skin had turned from pale white into tanned leather. It was shocking watching this happen.
Yeah very similar story. A friend of my wife's started tanning and now she looks like an old bag of brown leather. Too much is never enough for her.
Isn’t that precisely the expected outcome of going to a tanning salon?
Shockingly unnatural, I assume, not shocking scientifically.
The UVB portion of sunlight indirectly increases dopamine levels. You find it mainly near noon-day sunlight, and tanning beds. So the feel-good effects may encourage users to come back for more.
Frequent tanning bed users all have this addict level rationalization for using them when everyone knows it's harmful.
The UV damage from tanning beds has been well documented for decades, but what's novel here is the genetic methylation analysis showing accelerated aging at the DNA level.
What's wild to me is the economics. Tanning salons charge $30-50/month to give you skin cancer. Meanwhile vitamin D supplements cost $10/year and achieve the same health benefit people claim to seek from tanning.
The only rational argument I've heard for controlled UV exposure is building a base tan before vacation to prevent burning. But even then, 1-2 minutes in a low-wattage bed would suffice - not the 20+ minute sessions people actually do.
Where are you seeing vitamin D supplements for $10/year? That’s several orders of magnitude less than most OTC supplements.
A Google search for vitamin d results in ads, ahem "sponsored results", for 180 servings for $27, which is about $55 for a full year assuming it's one serving per day, which is the same decimal order of magnitude as $10 (but, I suppose, since we are on HN, is three or four orders of magnitude in binary)
80-90% of the visible signs of ageing come from the sun. This is why, in older people, you'll find their body generally looks younger than their face. This is because clothes protected their body from the sun, but their faces were fully exposed.
Always wear sunscreen on your hands, face and neck every time you go outside. If you're the type of HN'er that is on the computer all day and rarely goes outside, doing this on the few occasions you do will take away one of the only opportunities the sun will have to age you.
A lot of people are already vitamin D deficient and avoiding sun or using sunscreen more will make it worse. The health risks and consequences are much greater than that of sun exposure, which is likely why sun exposure decreases cancer risk and mortality rates substantially, despite the increased risk of skin cancer.
looking young is a fine goal, but this advice is too general on a forum like this. The actual UV index varies wildly based on location and time of year.
Your advice would be crazy in seattle or london for example. Except summer time, or if one works outdoors.
You recommend I put on sunscreen when it’s cloudy, i can’t see the sun, and the weather app shows a UV index of 3? You did say “every time” lol. I’ve noticed people in this thread (not you specifically) don’t have the capacity for nuance on this subject. It’s baffling to me.
Questions people should ask themselves:
- how long will i be outside?
- is it early morning or early evening? if so sunscreen is pointless.
- what is the peak UV index in my location today? is it 2 or 11?
- am i genetically predisposed to skin cancer, or have very light skin?
Link to study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12700204/
Although I think the more interesting question is whether sunbed use increases or decreases overall mortality. The only study I can find is Lindqvist's:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/joim.12251?g...
Overall, sunbed use reduced the all-cause mortality by a ratio of 0.77 or 0.87 depending on the model used. It increased the risk of developing MM, and the risk of dying from MM, although all-cause mortality was not increased even in patients diagnosed with MM. (This seems to be because there is a very low overall risk of MM mortality, but UV light exposure seems to provide a greater overall health benefit than the small risk of increased MM risk).
It’s like someone wrote an article in 1992 and finally decided to submit it.
It's news for many Americans.
No it isn't.
"The young tanning bed users had more skin mutations than people twice their age, especially in their lower backs, an area that does not get much damage from sunlight but has a great deal of exposure from tanning beds."
So in other areas than the lower back, everyone - tan bed users or not - have these supposed seeds of melanoma as well? And that is for a much larger area of the skin than the one mentioned.
Also I wonder about the quote that a mutated cell can never go back. The immune system could kill the mutated cells and thereby promote the unmutated ones. Though nothing is perfect of course. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jan/analysis-protective-lung...
> The immune system could kill the mutated cells and thereby promote the unmutated ones.
This happens all the time. The mutated cells we see are the ones that immune system couldn't detect and kill. Fortunately they are still overwhelmingly non-cancerous, but unfortunately some might be.
Yes I agree, I was just responding the article's "“We cannot reverse a mutation once it occurs, ..." I don't think that is entirely accurate. Also, I think it is a dynamic process, so even cells the immune system hasn't killed yet could be found later. Or the mutation could cause other deviancies that will make the cell uncompetitive with healthy cells. But it is a slow process - it takes years for former smokers' lung cancer risk to return to near that of never smokers. And it probably never gets there - some mutated cells may never be detectable and there's clearly also a threshold beyond which the cancer is irreversible, at least without intervention.
If you travel around you can see with your own eyes that countries that have both A) more sun and B) culture of intentional exposure (e.g. at the beach) people by the age they're 40 have on average noticeably worse skin. More wrinkles, more dark patches etc.
Don’t even have to go to other countries.
Just visit New Mexico (;->
More skin cancer
Its like everyone's arguing we should optimally live in darkness. As if 1. Humans didnt evolve living outdoors, 2. Everyone ages at the same rate 3. If they did, no one would ever get MM again. Like many things across the universe, too much of a good thing becomes bad. And "too much" varies considerably from one individual to the next. And no one in their 80s who avoided exposure to the sun is without wrinkles.
I thought the healthy consensus was to get a little of actual sunlight on the skin for vitamin D production and other things
What about red light treatment,
https://platinumtherapylights.eu/?srsltid=AfmBOoo2cCKKYMO53w...
I live in Ireland, there's practically 0 opportunity to get exposed to the sun unless you work outdoors, and even then only your face and hands and perhaps forearms get exposed. I just take vitamin D tablets.
Also I know UV goes through clouds, but when its raining all the time you tend to stay indoors and only go outside with raincoat / umbrella.
This reminds me of the "Tanning Mom".
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/26/justice/new-jersey-tannin...
Why go to the expense of a tanning bed when you can get skin cancer for free.
Geographically this is unpractical at some locations. Mild understatement. Do you happen to live in a year round sunny place?
This is true. As a society we often overlook the barriers to get skin cancer in many communities.
The tongue in cheek is strong in this one ^
My job requires me to work indoors during high-UV hours. But I'll look into weekend exposure, thanks!
Get a job as a welder and you can get UV exposure every day!
It’s currently -10C with 50km/h wind gusts. The cloud cover suggests I’ll see some snow today. There is no sun.
I’ll lend you my balcony if you want to try for a tan. Do you think it will happen before sunset? That’s 430pm and it is currently 10:30am.
Most of you would not even be close to guessing the top ten states with the highest skin cancer rates.
Utah Minnesota Vermont Arizona Iowa Idaho New Hampshire South Dakota Nebraska Kentucky
https://statecancerprofiles.cancer.gov/incidencerates/index....
Skin damage, and skin cancer, is not just about the sun. It is about genetics and nutrition as well.
It's not just about cancer. it's about aesthetics, how leathery you look.
Lip fillers are the new artificial tanning.
Looking forward to seeing the downstream effects.
As a naturist I’ve always wondered whether there’s a difference in prevailing skin cancer rates, but I’ve never found any data.
How does this compare to Melatonan peptide?
Melanotan makes your skin react to light more effectively and you can get a full tan quite quickly with it (even in a few days). I don't know whether that means it ages you less because it takes less UV exposure to get a good tan with it or if it has some other adverse side effect. But I have tried it once and it is definitely effective.
I assume both is unhealthy, but I also like to be tanned and take the risk. Preferably from safe sun, but when not possible I’m debating tanning bed vs Melatonan and I haven’t found evidence.
What a stupid thing. Probably on par with people bleaching their skin with chemicals.
But my b-hole is b-hole coloured and what if somebody sees it?
In my experience, people who tan know this but the argument is always they don’t care it’s part of life and it’s better to just enjoy now than spend time worrying about looking wrinkly in the future, because what’s the point of being old and having smooth perfect skin?
Fucking stupid, there is nothing better in life than looking young and beautiful forever IMO.
Most people can barely think a month ahead, they will wake up one day and be like oh shit why do I look so old and panic hard and do all sorts of surgeries, skin creams etc. nonsense while they could have just avoided the sun or used the suncreen..
Most people thinking aging is something that happens to other people, but that they will always pass for 20 something. Then they get offended when you correctly guess their age in the late 30s or 40s.
After workout, i sit in the mild sun each morning before having my breakfast and have done so for many years now. I live near Himalayas and sun is always there, except for some weeks of winter.
It’s not just the working out — it’s the sun lounging that has really made you comprehend the differences.
And?
He's very fit but looks like he's 120 years old.
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